Light On Dark Water

I've only written about Israel a few times here. Actually I couldn't remember having done so at all, but since I've been doing this since 2004, and have accumulated over 2500 posts, I know I can't entirely trust my memory on that sort of thing, so I checked, and there were a couple of brief posts in 2006 (here and here). I generally avoid taking strong stands on questions where matters of fact are all-important and I don't think I have an adequate grasp of them. And the question of Israel and the Palestinians is one of those. My more or less instinctive sympathy tends toward Israel, but one of the few things I feel pretty sure of regarding that situation is that there are two sides to the story.

I can't help noticing, though, that news and commentary on that conflict generally focus far more on Israel, and especially on news that reflects badly on Israel, than on any of the other issues involved. Beyond that, news about Israel is given far more attention than it would seem to deserve based on any objective appraisal of its size and role in world affairs. That role, as Israel seems to see it as far as I can tell, is simply to continue to exist. And while in Israel's case that is not an uncontroversial view, the attention does seem excessive. Moreover, while I don't think the coverage is wholly anti-Israel, it certainly seems to focus more on the rights and wrongs of Israel's behavior than on the situation to which Israel is responding. 

A week or two ago someone posted on Facebook this story by Matti Friedman in The Tablet about this phenomenon, and it's well worth reading. The writer speaks from experience as a former Associated Press reporter. Here's a lengthy excerpt in which he describes the journalistic practice:

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

The piece is long, going not only into the disproportionate amount of coverage but its deliberate slanting, and I won't try to summarize all that, but I repeat: if you're interested in the question at all, it's well worth reading. 

It got me to thinking about the peculiar focus on Israel among certain elements of the left. Even if you take the worst-case appraisal of Israel's faults, the fact that there is a very vocal movement attempting to turn Israel into an international pariah–the BDS movement ("Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions")–has always puzzled me. There are, as far as I know, no similar movements on the left toward ostracizing governments which have truly deserved it, such as the various despotisms of the Middle East. Nor does the enormous death toll of intra-Muslim conflicts currently in progress throughout that region seem to bring much impassioned condemnation of the participants, but rather blame for the West for having created the situation in the first place. There's something to that, but it seems odd to make it the problem, when the more immediate driver is the most brutal sort of struggle for power.

The author of the Tablet piece believes that the exaggerated emphasis and blame heaped on Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. And I don't have any trouble believing that that's a factor, especially in countries with a long history of it. 

But there's something else at work, too, something having to do with the moral status assigned to victimhood in the post-Christian West, most especially to victims of Euro-American civilization. Many wrongs were perpetrated by that civilization, and sympathy for the victims of those wrongs by the descendants and inheritors of those who committed them is a good thing. But there's a point, reached a long time ago by many, where it becomes pathological, unable or unwilling to recognize the virtues of its own past or the vices of its victims. And Israel, by virtue of the place of Jews in that culturally Christian civilization, and of the role of Western powers in the creation and support of Israel, is seen as an outpost of the oppressor, one of the last remaining in the one-time colonial lands. (But if Israel is said to have no right to exist because its borders were drawn by the colonial powers, why not also others, such as Iraq? Would there be any nation-states in the modern sense at all in that region if not for colonial impositions?)

One of the features of this view is that it attributes little or no active will or capacity for action to the victims; they can only react to the actions of the oppressors, like the balls in a pinball machine, and are not assigned serious moral responsibility. The focus on Israel is thus a back-handed compliment to Israel, and a back-handed insult to the Palestinians. Israel, insofar as it is a part of the liberal democratic-commercial Western order, has responsibilities, and is held to a high standard of conduct. There are no similar expectations of the Palestinians. One of the few memorable things George W. Bush ever said (and presumably they were someone else's words) was his reference to "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

I shouldn't discuss this topic at all without acknowledging that there is, at least in the U.S., a right-wing view that pretty much absolves Israel of any blame for anything, sees the Palestinians, and Arabs or Muslims at large, as monsters, and is at least as simplistic as the BDS movement. But that's a different set of errors, made for different reasons.